This invention relates to apparatus or equipment, commonly referred to as a reel carrier, particularly adapted for use with power hauling equipment, such as a fork-lift type vehicle, and intended for handling and transporting heavy objects of the type which ordinarily have a central opening. More particularly, the invention is especially adapted for the handling and transportation of coils of material such as wire or cable. Even more particularly, the invention is adapted for the handling of such coils of material over rough terrain. The invention will be described in an exemplary form herein as adapted for use with reels of cable, such articles normally being relatively heavy and unwieldy.
The specific genesis of the present invention is from the electrical construction industry where large-sized cable reels are always difficult to handle and normally pose major problems to transport and use in a cost effective manner.
Usually the cable reels are moved by power hauling equipment, such as a fork-lift truck, from a storage yard to the point where the cable is to be pulled. The cable reels are then set up on pre-positioned, stationary reel jacks for the actual pulling portion of the operation. Once the pull is completed, the cable reels are lowered from the reel jacks, reloaded onto the fork-lift or hauling equipment and transported back to the storage yard for unloading and storage (a time-consuming, costly and sometimes dangerous operation for the workers).
In general, in activities such as the above-described cable pulling involving cable being payed-out to overhead line poles, or underground tunnel conduits, or in construction wiring of new buildings, the individual cable reels must be aligned with the proposed cable path and held in a freely rotatable, but fixed position, so that the cable may be pulled or payed-out from the reel. If a number of cables are to be pulled, each cable reel must be aligned and positioned, then moved to align and position the next cable reel. As each reel may easily weigh several hundreds of pounds, power hauling equipment, such as a fork-lift truck, is normally used to move, align and position the cable reels. While the use of power hauling equipment has considerably facilitated handling cable reels, present problems in handling, transportation, storage and cost-effective use of equipment remain.
These problems include those of attaching or securing lifting and handling means to the reel or coil so that the reels may be quickly aligned, moved and held in a freely rotatable but fixed position for pulling activities.
Another problem is that power hauling equipment is expensive and therefore must be used in the most cost-effective manner possible to complete the job and insure its nearly constant availability for small but necessary tasks. Accordingly, it has been found that it is impracticable to dedicate power hauling equipment solely to align and position reels.
Because of the continuing need for cost-effective solutions to such demanding problems which can mean profit or loss and thus life or death to a small company or increased cost to the consumer-customer of a large company, it is a primary object of this invention to provide a simplified, economic, inexpensive yet extremely effective solution to the problems stated. The invention provides this solution in the form of a simplified but effective, novel and non-obvious means and technique for aligning, repositioning, lifting and transporting a single or multiple reels.
In actual application to cable pulling operations in the electrical construction industry, the present invention would load the cable reels at the storage yard and be moved by power hauling equipment to the pull site. Further, the cable reels may be easily transported over rouch terrain that might otherwise impede their movement by power hauling equipment. Unlike existing prior art of which the inventors are aware, the reels are already in a configuration such that the cable, coiled on the carried reels, may be pulled directly from the reels as they are being carried by the device. When the pull is completed, the cable reels can be moved directly back to the storage yard or to another pull site with little further handling or loss of costly workers' time.
It will be seen then, that the invention eliminates much of the redundant and dangerous labor found in handling large, heavy and unwieldy cable reels, thus providing a safer and more cost-effective solution to the problems outlined above.